Happy New Years: The files are coming….and ReCaptcha

We’re working on restoring the original System7 file archive. You can view what we’ve restored over at Files.System7. We’ve replaced the user /credit system with the ReCaptcha service. We don’t want users to register (which no one likes) but we also want to protect ourselves from leechers aka wget’ers.

If you haven’t heard how ReCaptcha works, not only does it block bots & spam but it performs a beneficial community OCR service at the same time. Every time you complete a captcha you’re also helping decipher a word which couldn’t be understood by a scanner (OCR). Currently your efforts are being used to aid in digitizing old versions of the New York Times. Honestly, not sure how that helps the starving children of Africa…

Using ReCaptcha, you’re given 2 words in the captcha phrase, 1 is known and 1 is unknown. If you type the known word correctly it will assume you also knew the word which OCR could not interpret. (The unknown word is actually given to multiple people and they must all have the same answer for it to be accepted). Read more about ReCaptcha here…